Friday’s TV: Parade’s End

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Imagine a thinking person’s Downton Abbey. Attach the names Stoppard and Cumberbatch and you have this superb series

BBC Two, 9pm
Adapted by Tom Stoppard from four related novels by Ford Madox Ford, this
five-part BBC/HBO period drama has quality written all over it, and that’s
before you start listing the superlative cast. Benedict Cumberbatch is
Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy
landowning family who has a passionate tryst with the capricious Sylvia
(Rebecca Hall) on a train. She is already pregnant, but Tietjens does the
decent thing and marries her. Sylvia is soon bored. She describes her
husband as “a precise sort of imbecile” — he is the kind of man who makes
corrections in